Save California State Parks, Legalize It

With our new California state budget our state parks are being cut significantly and many will be closed.

Green Ribbon – SOS Parks! – "Save Our State Parks Weekend – Thank you for your support of California’s State Parks! Visit your favorite state park and show your support by taking a picture while you are there of you and your friends wearing a green ribbon, wearing green or holding a sign! "

In general, these twitter ribbon campaigns have seemed useless to me, but I am a proponent of state parks and I felt compelled to participate in this campaign. I do not think it will have any positive impact on the park system. However, I have an idea that would.

Instead of closing parks to shore up the California budget California could have a positive and immediate impact on the budget by changing the drug laws. More than half of the California state budget is allocated to prisons and the criminal justice system. More than half of the inmates in our state prisons are non-violent drug offenders. Do the math.

Legalize it – don’t criticize it

– Peter Tosh

Disclaimer: I will not advertise it and it probably is not good for the flu, asthma tuberculosis or even umara composis as Peter Tosh tells us in his song, but it surely would be good for our tax base as well as our budget. Moreover, legalization would negatively impact the drug gangs in Mexico, which again would have a positive and immediate impact on our budget.

I am not a hippie pot head, but I am a pragmatist and the current drug laws are an artifact of the Reagan administration’s fear politicking that is the single largest contributing factor to the bankrupting of our state. It is clear the current drug laws are as absurd as prohibition in the 1920s.

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Autophagy can promote cell survival or cell death, but the molecular basis underlying its dual role in cancer remains obscure. Here we demonstrate that Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main active component of marijuana, induces human glioma cell death through stimulation of autophagy. Our data indicate that THC induced ceramide accumulation and eukaryotic translation initiation factor 2α (eIF2α) phosphorylation and thereby activated an ER stress response that promoted autophagy via tribbles homolog 3–dependent (TRB3-dependent) inhibition of the Akt/mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) axis. We also showed that autophagy is upstream of apoptosis in cannabinoid-induced human and mouse cancer cell death and that activation of this pathway was necessary for the antitumor action of cannabinoids in vivo. These findings describe a mechanism by which THC can promote the autophagic death of human and mouse cancer cells and provide evidence that cannabinoid administration may be an effective therapeutic strategy for targeting human cancers…